Mere Christianity -- Book 4, Chap. 3

Time and Beyond Time

Lewis suggests in the opening paragraph that if you feel that this topic is more of an “unnecessary complication” than something truly helpful, please feel free to skip to the next chapter.

Lewis is dealing with the age-old question of God and Time, which he now takes up in relation to his previous discussion of God and Prayer and in regards to a statement made to him:

I can believe in God all right, but what I cannot swallow is the idea of Him attending to several hundred million human beings who are all addressing Him at the same moment.

Lewis says that the difficulty of the statement is focused on God hearing all the prayers “at the same moment” in time. 

We can easily comprehend God hearing an almost infinite number of prayers if they simply came one at a time and God had essentially an endless amount of time to hear them.  But how is it possible for even God to fit all these prayer requests into one moment in time?

Man and Time

The problem with attempting to understand God’s relation to time is that we can only comprehend of time from our perspective.  For man, we experience life from moment to moment, as a succession of events with a past, present, and future.  We then impose that structure of time upon God and suppose that he too must have a past, present, and future. 

But some theologians, philosophers, and scientists now believe that there are some things in the universe that do not exist in time.

God and Time

The classical position (timelessness) of the church’s theologians (Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, etc.) has agreed that God is not in time.  God does not experience events in His life as a succession of moments in time. 

The classical view is to be distinguished from the more contemporary view (temporality) of God being everlasting – or that God lives within in time and has a history.  God exists through time like us but without a beginning or end.  God is everlasting – He has always existed and always will. 

If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty.  Ten-thirty – and every other moment from the beginning of the world – is always the Present for Him.  If you like to put it that way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.

Lewis provides an imperfect analogy.  Suppose he is writing a novel:

“Mary laid down her work; next moment came a knock at the door!”

For Mary who has to live in the imaginary time of my story there is no interval between putting down the work and hearing the knock.  But I, who am Mary’s maker, do not live in that imaginary time at all.  Between writing the first half of that sentence and the second, I might sit down for three hours and think steadily about Mary.  I could think about Mary as if she were the only character in the book and for as long as I please, and the hours I spent in doing so would not appear in Mary’s time (the time inside the story) at all.

Lewis writes, “God is not hurried along in the Time-stream of this universe any more than an author is hurried along in the imaginary time of his own novel.”

Rather, God has an infinite amount of time to spend on each one of his creatures.  He does not have to deal with the whole mass of humanity in one moment.  “You are as much alone with Him as if you were the only being He had ever created.”

Where Lewis’ analogy breaks down is that the author of the story lives within time as well.  He may not live within the time frame of Mary, but he exists in his own time frame (the real one).  But God does not have a time-series at all.  He is outside of time and can know all time at any moment.  “For His life is Himself.”

If you picture time as a straight, horizontal line on a page, then God is the whole page.  We move along the line moment by moment – we leave A as we approach B and have not yet arrived at C.  But God stands outside the line and sees all at one moment.

Jesus:  the God/man

Lewis argues that this view of God’s relation to time relieves some apparent difficulties with the Christian faith.  For instance, how did the God of the universe, who is everywhere and keeps everything, at the same time become a human baby?

But the assumption is that Christ’s life as God was limited to His humanity.  Lewis writes:

I was assuming that Christ’s life as God was in time, and that His life as the man Jesus in Palestine was a shorter period taken out of that time – just as my service in the army was a shorter period taken out of my total life.

But did the Son of God take a hiatus from being God while human?  No. 

You cannot fit Christ’s earthly life in Palestine into any time-relations with His life as God beyond all space and time.

But God does not have a history.  He is beyond change – He is immutable and unchangeable.  God never learns new things or forgets things – He knows all things (past, present, and future for us) and He knows them perfectly at any moment (cf. Ps. 90:2-4; Job 36:26; Isa. 45:21; 46:9-10; John 1:1-3; 8:58 [Ex. 3:14]; 2 Peter 3:8; Rev. 1:8).  The human life of the Son of God had a history, but the deity of the Son is outside of time, what theologians call the “extra calvinisticum.” 

The Word is fully united to but never totally contained within the human nature and, therefore, even in incarnation is to be conceived of as beyond or outside of (extra) the human nature (see Richard Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms, 111).

For God to have a history means that he must constantly loose some part of his reality (past) or not have some part of it (future).  All he would have is the little part of the present, which would be gone before you can speak about it.   

As Augustine said, “Christ became what He was not, without ceasing to be what He already was.”

Foreknowledge and Free Will

Lewis raises yet another way this view of God being external to time helps solve a possible dilemma within the Christian faith for some, namely the question of foreknowledge and free will.  The problem can be stated like this:  If God, already in the past, knows what I will do in the future, how can I possibly act different from what God already knows and therefore, how can my actions be truly free.

But Lewis argues that the problem only exists when we think of God moving along a time line like ours where he foresees what we are going to do before we do it. 

But if we understand God being outside of time altogether, then what God sees is not an action future to Him, but the action as it happens within our time frame.  What we call “tomorrow” is already presently visible to Him.  Therefore, God is not foreseeing what you are going to do and therefore locking you into that one action – rather He is simply watching you do it as you do it.  In other words, if God sees you doing something in the present time it in no way detracts from man’s freedom, any more than when we see someone doing something in the present, which does not affect their freedom.

For God every moment in the future and in the past for us is in the eternal now for Him.

While we can agree with Lewis on God being external to time, we understand God’s foreknowledge to be based not upon his seeing our actions, but His own ordained plan from all eternity, which He is now executing in time and space.  In other words, God does not look at what “we” do to know our actions.  He knows them solely because He has ordained them according to His own eternal will.

If all of this does not help you, as Lewis says, “leave it alone . . . You can be a perfectly good Christian without accepting it, or indeed without thinking of the matter at all.”